United Liberty - libertarianshttp://www.unitedliberty.org/taxonomy/term/650/0
enRand Paul has already won: Republicans are rethinking foreign policyhttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/17631-why-do-libertarians-shy-away-from-defense-issues
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="/files/images/Paul-Daily-Show.png" alt="" width="520" height="332" /></p> <p>Conservatism seems to be appealing again, thanks in no small part to the &#8220;get off my lawn establishment politician!&#8221; flavor of the increasingly-difficult-to-ignore libertarian wing of the big tent. And it&#8217;s not difficult to understand why. When a policy push advocates, generally, for a less intrusive government regarding taxation and electronic spying and nanny state moralizing, free people tend to sit up and take notice.</p> <p>But there&#8217;s one area critics of libertarianism have at least a marginally sturdy leg to stand on: foreign policy/national defense. And it&#8217;s not because libertarians don&#8217;t care about these issues; rather, it&#8217;s that there hasn&#8217;t been a unified voice concerning these issues from a group that is fairly consistent on most other major policy ideas, making criticism an easy task.</p> <p>In short, libertarians, as vocal a group on politics as any you&#8217;re likely to meet, shy away en masse from making definitive statements about foreign policy. But there may be some very good &#8212; and surmountable &#8212; reasons for that. One of them is an exhaustion with the interventionist philosophy of neocons, one many libertarians feel has kept the US in expensive and bloody wars and conflicts in different parts of the world for far too long. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-mission-in-place-to-aid-in-the-search-for-250-schoolgirls-abducted-in-nigeria/2014/05/12/1d0c29de-da1e-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html">And it&#8217;s a philosophy that, oddly, continues still</a>.</p> <p>No one is suggesting it&#8217;s not an utter tragedy what happened to those Nigerian schoolgirls. But is it a conflict we should be involving ourselves in? And why? Those questions have yet to be answered or &#8212; frankly &#8212; even posed.</p> <p>Another is simply that same &#8220;get off my lawn!&#8221; mentality, just applied to citizens of other countries. And, for the most part, libertarians will tell you no one has listened to their calls for a less invasive US, and that has left them adrift without a strong, vocal leader on that particular issue. Until now.</p> <p>Now, in fact, everyone seems to be listening.</p> <p>For example, despite <a href="/sites/all/modules/terraeclipse/te_admin/includes/tiny_mce/$host/www.politico.com/morningdefense/0514/morningdefense13913.html">presenting Sen. Marco Rubio as a bit more hawkish on foreign policy than he was just a few years ago</a>, this WSJ piece leaves little doubt that even a more hawkish Rubio doesn&#8217;t come close to the philosophy of a McCain or Graham:</p> <blockquote><p>Calling for sanctions against the Venezuelan government for human-rights violations and heavier economic pressure on Russia because of its policy toward Ukraine, the Florida Republican seems to be defying a declining appetite for U.S. engagement abroad.</p> <p>But his approach, aides say, aims to be more nuanced than the hawkish postures taken by past GOP presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mr. Rubio&#8217;s brand of foreign policy reflects, they say, a commitment to American might along with caution toward military intervention.</p> <p>Mr. Rubio on Friday night appeared for the first time this election cycle in New Hampshire, the host of the nation&#8217;s first presidential primary and a veteran-heavy state that has favored candidates known as defense hawks, Messrs. McCain and Romney among them.</p> <p>&#8220;If you want to decrease the likelihood that your military will ever have to go to war, make it a military that could never lose any war,&#8221; Mr. Rubio told about 300 people gathered for a Rockingham County Republican Committee dinner in New Castle.</p></blockquote> <p>Then there&#8217;s the arguably <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sen-ted-cruz-ukraine-2014-5">measured and thoughtful approach of Sen. Ted Cruz</a> as he prepares to make a trip to Ukraine to determine what he calls the &#8220;enormous threat from a resurgent Russia&#8221;:</p> <blockquote><p>&#8220;(Russian President) Vladimir Putin has been quite naked about his desire to reconstitute as much as possible the old Soviet Union,&#8221; Cruz said. &#8220;I have a particular responsibility to assess firsthand the current and future military threats that could jeopardize our safety and the security of our allies.&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>Assessing current and future threats firsthand is a far cry from sending troops to meet the Russian aggression on an ideological battlefield.</p> <p>And of course, there is the recent conversion of sorts of the libertarian hero Sen. Rand Paul, who has begun to compare himself with the always circumspect &#8212; but never cowardly &#8212; <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/in-claiming-reagan-rand-paul-concedes-foreign-policy-vulnerability-in-2016/article/2548451">foreign policy of Ronald Reagan</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Paul, 51, never ran for, or held, public office before being elected to the Senate in 2010. Whether political maneuvering or philosophical adjustment, Paul has been thinking about the political hurdle foreign policy could present in his White House bid since 2012, when he regularly campaigned in front of packed crowds as a surrogate for his father. Back then, Paul <a href="http://www.rollcall.com/news/Rand-Paul-Stumps-to-Educate-Voters-on-Dads-Positions-211387-1.html?pg=1&amp;dczone=politics" target="_blank">lamented that</a> his father&#8217;s foreign policy views were hampering the elder Paul&#8217;s prospects.</p> <p>&#8220;I think he attracts a lot of people, actually, with the non-interventionist foreign policy. And then there are some who like it, but feel like, &#8216;Well gosh, I still want somebody who cares that Iran might get nuclear weapons,&#8217;” Paul told Roll Call two years ago while stumping for his father in New Hampshire. During a brief interview on Wednesday, Paul stood by the comparison of his foreign policy to Reagan&#8217;s, saying that his views are evolving.</p> <p>“I try to make sure people know what my foreign policy is, and my foreign policy is something that’s a gradual thing that we both come to grips with and present in the sense that, three years ago I was an ophthalmologist and didn’t have a foreign policy,” Paul told the <em>Washington Examiner</em>. “Foreign policy depends on the events as they are, so you really have to judge each instance of what’s going on around the world by events.”</p></blockquote> <p>All of this suggests a strange and hopeful thing: that the people&#8217;s popular thought &#8212; one desiring a scaling back of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy &#8212; has actually influenced the policy positions of some leading conservatives on the Hill. And as those leaders vocalize that change in thought, libertarians, as a movement, may find it easier to debate and be open about what they collectively think about foreign policy as well.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/17631-why-do-libertarians-shy-away-from-defense-issues#commentsConservativesForeign PolicyJohn McCainlibertarianismlibertariansLindsey GrahamMarco RubioneoconservativesNigeriaRand PaulRepublican PartyRepublicansRonald ReaganRussiaTed CruzFri, 16 May 2014 15:30:26 +0000slee17631 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgMartin Luther King, Radicalhttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/16284-martin-luther-king-radical
<p style="text-align: center;" dir="ltr"><img src="http://travisthornton.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/MLK-Dream-color.jpg" alt="" width="520" height="347" /></p><p dir="ltr"><em>Jason M. Farrell is a writer and activist based in Washington D.C. A former research fellow with the Center For Competitive Politics, he has been published in The Daily Caller, Policy Mic, LewRockwell.com and The Federalist, among other blogs and news sites.</em></p><p dir="ltr">Click around the internet today, and you’ll find no shortage of libertarians debating Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideology, as many try to claim King as their own. Absent from much of today’s discussion over beliefs will be a discussion of strategy or purpose. That burning question—how can we make change happen?—is usually answered with exhortations to call your congressman and sign petitions.</p><p dir="ltr">King realized over fifty years ago that begging the government for action contrary to its own interests was a futile endeavor—only radical action can inspire radical change. Libertarians should consider this may be a far more important takeaway from his legacy than the “libertarianness” of his dream.</p><p dir="ltr">King did not want to wait for politicians to care about change, or courts to come around and see the virtues of abandoning long-standing legal precedents. Gradual or incremental change, in point of fact, is usually no change at all. “I think the word ‘gradualism’&#8230; is so often an excuse for escapism and do-nothingism which ends up in stand-stillism,” King said in a 1957 television interview. “I think we must move on toward this great goal… we must re-examine this whole emphasis that the approach to desegregation must be gradual rather than forthwith or immediate”. No generation wants to be the one to endure a painful shake-up in the status quo, a fact Dr. King and his generation knew too well.</p><p dir="ltr">King, like Gandhi, believed that the morality and methodology of civil disobedience were not separate concepts, but part of a single belief system, one that he believed in the power of to change hearts and minds by social disruption. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” King stated in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”</p><p dir="ltr">As King notes in his famous “Letter,” when his protests started creating serious tension, white and black conservatives alike balked, imploring him to “wait” and chiding him for wanting social change to happen “too fast.” The Civil Rights radicals found themselves up against considerable resistance from the mainstream of political thought when the status quo of peace—even a peace that masks gross injustice— was threatened. Many black church leaders opposed radicalism in favor of using the court system, fearing reprisals by whites.</p><p dir="ltr">But King’s strategy was radicalism at its finest: shaking people out of racial apathy by exposing government evils and drawing out latent hatred within both the state and civilian population, then using non-violent resistance to foster guilt in southern whites and drum up sympathy from the rest of the country.</p><p dir="ltr">Civil rights groups like the Freedom Riders sought to confront racists in order to deliberately provoke violence, hoping the publicity would show that desegregationists had the moral high ground. “The Freedom Riders typified one of the standard contradictions within the civil rights movement&#8230; on the one hand it’s nonviolent&#8230; on the other hand they’re really courting violence in order to attract publicity that will forward the cause&#8230; so you have these mixed motives” said Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP.</p><p dir="ltr">Jesse Jackson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJ9CUj6h-w">agreed</a>: “Every time the blood of the innocent was spilled, every time a worker was martyred, it exploded interest in our struggle.” Dr. King saw the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ll4QmvnGcU">strategy</a> as an effective way of exposing discomfort among bigots in the South with their own attitudes…”I think it arouses a sense of shame among them in many instances… it does something to touch the conscience and establish a sense of guilt.”</p><p>Dr. King also saw the value in deliberately receiving abuse for a cause. “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he exhorted his followers in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Deliberate suffering for political ends, no matter how worthy, seems a foreign concept to most people, rich and poor alike. Regardless, it was essential to the success of the Civil Rights Movement.</p><p dir="ltr">There is also a lesson here about overcoming the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice">Public Choice</a> problem; empathy can even generate enough political will to overcome self-interest on a large scale. Civil disobedience was necessary to expose both racism and perverse government interests; not only the interest of local governments to preserve their racial feudalism, but the interest of the federal government to keep things quiet and preserve the status quo, no matter how unjust.</p><p dir="ltr">Much of the violence against the Freedom Riders, including a firebombing of their bus and a vicious mob beating in May 1961, happened with the complicity of the local police and authorities. The FBI, under the direction of the Kennedy administration, knew of the threats to the protesters but declined to intervene. The Kennedy brothers, focused on the Soviet threat, had previously been extremely reluctant to intervene in civil rights issues and considered the protests a mere nuisance.</p><p dir="ltr">The outrage generated by the protests in Birmingham forced the Kennedys to proclaim to the world that they sided with civil rights against the mobs. Kennedy pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission to desegregate interstate bus travel shortly thereafter, and finally called on congress in 1963 to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66_kqSG6aHI">ban</a> Jim Crow laws. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, <a href="http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/civil-rights-act-1.html">used public sympathy</a> generated by successful disobedience incidents such as the Children’s Crusade in May 1963 (during which fire hoses were turned on children) to pass the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964.</p><p dir="ltr">For decades, the Left has advanced its agenda by exploiting depressions, wars, and national tragedies, appealing to the public’s sense of empathy to advance their own brand of radicalism that redefined the role of the federal government over the last century.</p><p dir="ltr">Today, the Left is in the awkward position of having to preserve the status quo they’ve helped to create, including the horrific legacy of the War on Drugs. Libertarians are the new radicals, and have an opportunity to show their mettle and demand immediate, radical change, rather than patiently waiting for politicians and a disinterested public to care. This is the best way we can honor King’s legacy in a way that comports with both his dream and our own.</p><p dir="ltr">No, King was not a libertarian, but he was a liberator. His fight until 1965 was directed at liberation from Jim Crow Laws rather than a forced equality, which would (and later did) alienate whites when his subsequent fight turned to advocacy for taxpayer-funded reparations. The lesson was a libertarian one—only liberation from bad laws is constructive; social engineering is doomed to fail.</p><p dir="ltr">Dr. King’s movement is a great example of how one man’s dream overcame the Public Choice problem: government self-interest and public apathy was overcome by appealing to the heart and the moral sense of the public. This may be the most important lesson for libertarians who aim to expose injustice and redefine the role of government in private affairs. Creating real political change is not as easy or painless as you might think.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/16284-martin-luther-king-radical#commentscivil disobediencecivil rightscivil rights-eraExtremismI have a dreamlibertariansMartin Luther KingMLKMLK Daynon-violent protestprotestpublic choiceradicalismsegregationMon, 20 Jan 2014 21:00:27 +0000Guest16284 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgWhat Exactly Do Libertarians Think About Foreign Policy?http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/16150-what-exactly-do-libertarians-think-about-foreign-policy
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="/files/images/robertgates.jpg" alt="Robert Gates" width="520" /></p> <p>Most people who care about such things have heard by now that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has written an insider&#8217;s account of working with both administrations. <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Duty-Memoirs-Secretary-at-War/dp/0307959473/">Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War</a></em> will be released to the general public next Tuesday and, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304617404579306851526222552">if the excerpts are any indication</a>, it looks to be quite the compelling read.</p> <p>While the comprehensive work will surely have much to offer, a small conceit included in what&#8217;s been released stands out, especially since the opinions &#8212; or lack thereof &#8212; regarding national security interests on the part of self-described libertarians are sure to be a major part of candidates&#8217; platforms in the coming election. If conservatives seeking office are smart, that is. Here&#8217;s the gem:</p> <blockquote><p><em>With Obama, however, I joined a new, inexperienced president determined to change course—and equally determined from day one to win re-election. Domestic political considerations would therefore be a factor, though I believe never a decisive one, in virtually every major national security problem we tackled. The White House staff—including Chiefs of Staff Rahm Emanuel and then Bill Daley as well as such core political advisers as Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs —would have a role in national security decision making that I had not previously experienced (but which, I&#8217;m sure, had precedents).</em><br />[&#8230;]<br />Domestic political considerations would therefore be a factor, though I believe never a decisive one, in virtually every major national security problem we tackled.</p></blockquote> <p>It&#8217;s no secret that libertarians shy away from making strong statements on national defense, and an argument could even be made that they view foreign policy effectiveness through the lens of how it affects domestic policy, similar to Gates&#8217; description of the Obama administration&#8217;s approach. This, on its face, isn&#8217;t necessarily a bad thing. But when a piece like <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/06/killer_elite#sthash.Y36hSW6f.dpbs">this one from <em>Foreign Policy</em></a> comes out using Pew Research to argue that the foreign policy elite &#8212; specifically the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) &#8212; is out of step with the public desire, it becomes a very obvious attempt to control the narrative.</p> <p>In fact, the <em>Foreign Policy</em> piece makes almost exactly the same argument that Gates describes &#8212; with something that appears close to frustration &#8212; while working with the Obama administration. (Allowing, of course, for the fact that the complete book may be a little more generous than a single excerpt would indicate.) From <em>FP</em>:</p> <blockquote><p>But the public sees many foreign policy goals through a domestic lens. Roughly eight-in-ten Americans rate a decidedly domestic issue &#8212; protecting the jobs of U.S. workers &#8212; as a top long-range foreign policy priority. Only about three-in-ten CFR members agree. This disparity in perspective may help explain the tension foreigners often perceive between the willingness of State Department and Pentagon officials to use U.S. trade policy as a tool of American foreign policy, writ large, and the resistance this tradeoff has encountered on Capitol Hill.</p></blockquote> <p>The point is that, if libertarians don&#8217;t want to be inadvertently lumped in with an ideology that insists, pursuant to the public will, the US become softer and softer on foreign policy &#8212; <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/opinion/bergen-al-qaeda-terrority-gains/">even as the world gets scarier and scarier</a> &#8212; they would do well to begin not only being decisive and unified about what they think as regards foreign policy, but vocal about it as well. Otherwise, they may find their opinions being decided for them.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/16150-what-exactly-do-libertarians-think-about-foreign-policy#commentsCFRForeign PolicyInterventionlibertariansMilitaryObama administrationRobert GatesSecDefSecretary of DefenseWarFri, 10 Jan 2014 15:09:44 +0000slee16150 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgEveryone's ideas are racist except minehttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/15811-everyones-ideas-are-racist-except-mine
<p>There are a few ways that a policy gets to be called racist: it is intended to negatively affect one race over another, it results in a negative affect on one race over another regardless of intent, or it has historically been used to negatively affect one race over another regardless of present intent or eventual result.</p> <p>The first two are justifiably used to disqualify certain policies; of course we shouldn&#8217;t enact things that are intended to or serve to foster racial discrimination. But the latter is used as a fallacious smear tactic almost exclusively against conservative and libertarian policies. If that&#8217;s how we&#8217;re going to debate, it&#8217;s long past time the historically racist origins of certain liberal policies got considered too.</p> <p>Federalism gets a bad rap obviously because of slavery and Jim Crow laws. The mantle of states&#8217; rights was used for a long time as a means to get away with any number of heinous injustices and atrocities. That is almost never the case today, yet one risks being labeled racist for suggesting it, whether the issue to which federalism is to be applied has anything to do with race or not.</p> <p>Well, if the putative federalist in question is a Republican, that is. Democrats are free to cling to states&#8217; rights when it is convenient without having to worry about similar ad hominem attacks. Even after President Obama&#8217;s hailed conversion on the issue of gay marriage, <a href="http://gawker.com/5909002/barack-obamas-bullshit-gay-marriage-announcement" target="_blank">he maintains</a> that states should be free to decide the issue themselves.</p> <p>This is effectively the same position as most elected Republicans, yet he doesn&#8217;t get called names because of it. Even the President&#8217;s signature health insurance reform grants states tremendous discretion in how much of the law&#8217;s new bureaucracy to implement themselves. Has anyone called Obamacare racist?</p> <p>Compare also the progressive holy grail of an ever-increasing minimum (living, or prevailing) wage. While the idea itself is older, the first real push for it in the US came during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century and was (along with much of that agenda) <a href="https://twitter.com/cynicusprime/status/408399211625848832" target="_blank">explicitly racist</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the &#8220;unemployable class.&#8221; It was Webb&#8217;s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage about the value of the unemployables&#8217; worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument <em>against</em> the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of - you guessed it - social Darwinism.</p></blockquote> <p>Of course, the left argues for increasing the minimum wage for exactly the opposite reasons today - to help the &#8220;less fortunate&#8221; and minorities out of poverty by increasing their income. But when do conservatives receive such benefit of the doubt? When a policy on the right happens to have a been advocated by racists in the past (usually for different or even opposite reasons its advocated today), that unfortunate fact becomes the first or even only argument against it.</p> <p>Or abortion. The <a href="http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/history-and-successes.htm#Sanger" target="_blank">much celebrated</a> founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a vile, abhorrent racist. She advocated birth control and abortion explicitly to &#8220;weed out&#8221; the classes and races she (and many other progressives at the time) saw as unfit and unhealthy for society. From Jonah Goldberg&#8217;s great book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W917ZG" target="_blank"><em>Liberal Fascism</em></a>:</p> <blockquote><p>In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned &#8220;Negro Project,&#8221; which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project&#8217;s racist intent is beyond doubt. &#8220;The mass of significant Negroes,&#8221; read the project&#8217;s report, &#8220;still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes&#8230;is [in] that proportion of the population least intelligent and fit.&#8221; Sanger&#8217;s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. &#8220;We do not want word to get out,&#8221; she wrote to a colleague, &#8220;that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>Even today up to <a href="http://kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/" target="_blank">40% of abortions</a> are performed on black women, even though they are only 13% of the eligible population. In cities like New York and Washington and many Southern states, black women actually receive the <em>majority</em> of abortions. But since abortion isn&#8217;t considered a negative by much of society, no one considers this the quasi-genocide that it actually is.</p> <p>One of the contemporary arguments for abortion (or at least against efforts to ban it) actually explicitly copies the historic eugenic support for the practice. Again from Goldberg:</p> <blockquote><p>Just a few years ago, the racial eugenic &#8220;bonus&#8221; of abortion rights was something one could only admit among those fully committed to the cause, and even then in politically correct whispers. No more. Increasingly, this argument is acceptable on the left, as are arguments in favor of eugenics generally.</p> <p>In 2005 the acclaimed University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt broke the taboo with his critical and commercial hit <em>Freakonomics</em> (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The most sensational chapter in the book updated a paper Levitt had written in 1999 which argued that abortion cuts crime. &#8220;Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.&#8221; <em>Freakonomics</em> excised all references to race and never connected the facts that because the aborted fetuses were disproportionally black and blacks disproportionally contribute to the crime rate, reducing the size of the black population reduces crime. Yet the press coverage acknowledged this reality and didn&#8217;t seem to mind.</p></blockquote> <p>Do you ever hear abortion and its advocates called racist (outside of pro-life rallies, that is) despite the plain racial historical context and resultant effects? Of course not. Indeed, when abortion opponents point out these ugly truths, <em>they</em> are called racist. How dare you try to tell black women what they can and can&#8217;t do with their bodies! Never mind that it&#8217;s in the pursuit of saving millions of black babies from the reaping.</p> <p>In fact, it&#8217;s very simple. Through decades of narrative engineering, the left has successfully defined anything the right does as necessarily racist in both intent and effect, and also anything racist as conservative by definition. When a liberal does or suggests something racist, it&#8217;s an aberration or a misunderstanding, and a simple apology is the harshest punishment necessary.</p> <p>When a conservative or libertarian does, it&#8217;s a glimpse into their very soul, an uncorrectable genetic defect that is remedied only by eliminating the offender and his entire ideology from public life (similar to eugenic remedies for poverty and crime in the Progressive Era). It turns out the soul of progressivism too is very dark indeed, and its time they were held to the same standards as the rest of us.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/15811-everyones-ideas-are-racist-except-mine#commentsAbortionabortionBarack ObamaBarack ObamaConservativeConservativesfederalismGay MarriageHealth CareJim CrowJonah GoldbergLiberalLiberal FascismLibertarianlibertariansliving wageMargaret Sangerminimum wageObamaCareObamaCarePlanned ParenthoodProgressiveprogressive eraprogressive movementprogressivesraceRacismFri, 06 Dec 2013 18:20:23 +0000authoridad15811 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgLibertarianism is like the new communism, dudehttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/14857-libertarianism-is-like-the-new-communism-dude
<p><em>Michael Hamilton is a libertarian writer living in Washington, D.C. His main interests are economics, drug legalization, immigration, and land-use policy.</em></p> <p>Libertarianism is the <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-05/libertarians-are-the-new-communists.html" target="_blank">new communism</a>, at least if you ask Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu:</p> <blockquote><p>Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. Both attempt to answer the same questions, and fail to do so in similar ways.</p></blockquote> <p>This colorful lede suggested they might offer a new critique of libertarianism, but my hopes were quickly dashed. The authors end up retreading old arguments&#8212;seemingly unaware that others had done so many times before. Their failure to offer a substantive appraisal of libertarian ideas may stem from low familiarity with libertarianism itself.</p> <p>Hanauer and Liu start with a decent definition of libertarianism, namely that it is &#8220;the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values.&#8221; This is fairly accurate characterization of the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1665934" target="_blank">moral beliefs</a> held by many libertarians. Unfortunately, the authors struggle to trace these moral foundations to basic philosophical or policy positions held by actual libertarians.</p> <p>They claim that claim that libertarians &#8220;call for the evisceration of government itself&#8221; but the paragons of libertarianism listed in their article&#8212;John Galt, the Koch brothers,Ted Cruz, Grover Norquist, Ron Paul and Rand Paul&#8212;are hardly anarchists. Three are Republican politicians, one is a Republican activist, two are billionaire donors to Republican and libertarian causes, and one is fictional character. All seven are villains for a large subset of Americans, but neither is an example that clarifies what libertarians stand for.</p> <p>I&#8217;m left wondering why they didn&#8217;t choose the two most prominent libertarian public figures in recent memory, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. Both wrote and spoke publicly about libertarian ideas, both received the Nobel Prize in Economics, and both would be familiar to readers. Each has sold millions of books that clearly outline mainstream libertarian ideas, and neither was an anarchist.</p> <p>The rest of the post rests on a single, embarrassing claim: &#8220;Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution.&#8221;</p> <p>A glance at the the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism" target="_blank">Wikipedia page on libertarianism</a> would make it clear that cooperation and voluntary association are the bedrock of libertarian ideas. As Tom Palmer <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/myths-individualism" target="_blank">explains</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing. And because that cooperation takes place among countless individuals unknown to each other, the rules governing that interaction are abstract in nature. Abstract rules, which establish in advance what we may expect of one another, make cooperation possible on a wide scale.</p></blockquote> <p>Libertarian scholars including <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_smith" target="_blank">Adam Smith</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill" target="_blank">John Stuart Mill</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase" target="_blank">Ronald Coase</a>, F.A. Hayek, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick" target="_blank">Robert Nozick</a>, have spent their entire careers examining human cooperation and the institutional arrangements that make it possible.</p> <p>Libertarians care so much about cooperation because they believe that its alternative, physical coercion, is both morally suspect and ineffective in nearly all cases. Rather than saying that people may do as they please, libertarians believe that individual actions must be restrained to the extent that they violate the rights of another person.</p> <p>How did Hanauer and Liu get it so wrong?</p> <p>Their unorthodox use of language may holds some clues. To them, the better alternative to libertarianism is a &#8220;blend of freedom and cooperation.&#8221; If it isn&#8217;t clear from that quote, they seem to think that freedom and cooperation are in opposition and there is a necessary tradeoff between the two.They also claim that &#8220;freedom is responsibility&#8221; without explaining what that actually means. Most people think that freedom and responsibility are distinct ideas.</p> <p>Their attack on libertarianism may have been a backhanded attempt to flesh out their own ideas. Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu have probably known that they disagree with libertarians for quite some time, but apparently they never took the time to figure out why.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/14857-libertarianism-is-like-the-new-communism-dude#commentsAdam SmithBloombergCommunismcommunistsEric LiuF.A. HayekGrover NorquistJohn GaltJohn Stuart MillKoch brotherslibertarianismlibertariansMichael HamiltonMilton FreidmanNick HanauerRand PaulTed CruzFri, 06 Sep 2013 20:01:56 +0000Guest14857 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgThe New Republican Party: Libertarian Fusionism in Virginiahttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/13888-the-new-republican-party-libertarian-fusionism-in-virginia
<p>The rise of the so-called &#8220;liberty movement,&#8221; which sprang out of the early days of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, and of the tea party movement, which was a reaction to the one-party Democrat rule in Washington after the 2008 elections (with Obama’s victory being the likely spark) has forced the Republican Party to wrestle with warring factions in an attempt to establish a winning coalition.</p> <p>Those in the media love to paint the GOP’s internal struggle as evidence of a party in the throes of extinction; as a party out-of-touch with mainstream America. But I think the “growing pains” the GOP are experiencing could potentially strengthen the Republican Party.</p> <p>I am of the opinion that we have two political parties in our first-past-the-post electoral system. Few candidates have won major office in recent history under the banner of any party other than the Republican or Democrat parties. There are exceptions, but they’re rare, and those candidates usually win because of their personality, rather than a set of ideals on which a party platform could be constructed. Think Maine’s Angus King or Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman.</p> <p>It is with that understanding that many within the “liberty movement” in Virginia have begun working within the Republican Party to move it in a more (small-L) libertarian direction. Our reasoning is that political parties do not hold a certain philosophy; they are vessels through which their members advance a set of ideas and beliefs. As the GOP looks for a path forward, it should look to the way the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) has embraced liberty activists.</p> <p>Prior to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, the RPV selected its 11 at-large delegates and 11 alternate delegates as a reflection of its March Presidential primary results: libertarian Republican Ron Paul garnered 40% of the primary vote and Mitt Romney captured 60%. No other candidate met the ballot access requirements.</p> <p>The committee that selected at-large delegates and alternates at the state convention picked a number of Ron Paul-aligned delegates (myself included) and a set of more “Establishment”-types.</p> <p>Most of the delegates from Virginia were bound to cast their first vote for Mitt Romney. 3 delegates from the 3rd Congressional District, where Paul received nearly 53% of the vote, were the only delegates who cast their votes for Ron Paul in Tampa. The other 46 delegates (3 from each Congressional District, 11 at-large delegates, the RPV Chairman, and National Committeeman and –woman) each cast their votes for Mitt Romney. In fact, a slight majority of the delegates from Virginia were aligned with the “liberty movement.”</p> <p>Those who make the rules and the important decisions within a political party are the ones who show up to those meetings. For example, the Arlington County Republican Committee (ACRC), of which I am a member, voted whether or not to support four separate local bond issues in their August 2012 meeting. Would the ACRC endorse the county’s desire to take on additional debt for special projects?</p> <p>While each vote was close, the younger, liberty-minded members opposed all four bond measures. (Noteworthy: ACRC member and Republican National Committeeman Morton Blackwell sided with young liberty-minded Republicans on each vote.) All but one of them passed, and the ACRC endorsed more spending and more debt. The debate was lively, and we would not have had it without the involvement of a new generation of right-of-center activists.</p> <p>Additionally, the Arlington Falls Church Young Republicans (AFCYR) is now led by a majority of these liberty activists (I’m the Vice Chairman), and our club has seen explosive growth. One in four Young Republicans in Virginia is a member of the AFCYRs. We have worked tirelessly to bridge the divide between the various segments within our own club.</p> <p>As one of those small-L libertarians, I want to work within the GOP to establish a successful governing majority to defeat those who want to grow government and restrict our liberties. Those of us who came into the political process because of Ron Paul or some other libertarian figure should work with the GOP to change the policies.</p> <p>We share many of the same goals as those who are considered traditional segments within the GOP. We want lower taxes, limited government, and a strong national defense. We think the individual knows best what to do with his or her earnings, and we want government to get out of the way, so we can try and succeed or fail.</p> <p>Where we disagree, may we have a lively but respectful debate. Should we intervene in the countless disputes within or among other nations? Should we legislate what people can ingest, smoke, or otherwise consume? Should we give government so much power that they can read our emails or listen in on our telephone conversations? Let’s lay out the facts and let party members and voters decide.</p> <p>Our presence within the various Republican organizations in Virginia has been welcomed. The RPV Chairman, Pat Mullins, and our National Committeeman, Morton Blackwell, have worked to expand the Republican Party by welcoming grassroots activists like us. More state Republican parties and umbrella organizations should reach out to libertarians in an effort to grow our numbers and defeat those who want only to grow government.</p> <p><em>Matthew Hurtt is a small-L libertarian who lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is Vice Chairman of the <a href="http://afcyr.org/">Arlington Falls Church Young Republicans</a> and a member of the Arlington County Republican Committee. He also served as an at-large delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa. Follow him on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewhurtt">@matthewhurtt</a></em></p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/13888-the-new-republican-party-libertarian-fusionism-in-virginia#commentsConservatismConservativesDemocratsfusionismGOPGrassrootsLeftistslibertarianismlibertariansliberty activistsLiberty Movementlimited governmentRepublican PartyRepublicansRNCRon PaulTaxesVirginiayoung RepublicansYRsMon, 03 Jun 2013 17:20:19 +0000mhurtt13888 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgDysfunctional Bedfellows: Free Speech, Capitalism and Social Mediahttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/13842-dysfunctional-bedfellows-free-speech-capitalism-and-social-media
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="/files/images/enjoy-capitalism.gif" alt="Enjoy Capitalism" width="520" /></p> <p>Libertarians and conservatives alike either are intimately aware of problems with speaking out on social media, or they are residing under virtual rocks. In spite of the proliferation of liberty-minded individuals on networks like Twitter and Facebook, those platforms are anything but welcoming to freedom-oriented content.</p> <p>On Twitter, there is the hated &#8220;gulag&#8221; that silences conservatives by exploiting an auto-account suspension rubric, or at least that is the explanation offered by the company. As for Facebook, it&#8217;s often turned into page suspensions and deletions for gun dealers, and conservative or libertarian commentators.</p> <p>Now, Facebook has ended up in the headlines over problems with questionable content. They are now going to take a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/controversial-harmful-and-hateful-speech-on-facebook/574430655911054">much more proactive stance when it comes to hate speech on their network</a>. Of course this was at the <a href="http://www.womenactionmedia.org/fbagreement/">behest of at least one feminist organization</a>. That is not to say that this wasn&#8217;t necessary. Of course, there should be serious action taken to prevent content that promotes violence against anyone. However, this is definitely political pandering, and arguably for the benefit of the least profitable portion of Facebook&#8217;s &#8220;clientele.&#8221;</p> <p>The social media giants &#8212; Facebook and Twitter &#8212; both are what community management professionals refer to as &#8220;organically grown&#8221; communities. That sounds wholesome, doesn&#8217;t it? Unfortunately, the term really doesn&#8217;t refer to anything remotely close to good or wholesome &#8212; it refers to something that grew out of the control of the originators. No wonder the executives don&#8217;t like to openly admit what that term really means, because it really should have a chilling effect on potential investors. If everyone remembers, that&#8217;s pretty much what happened shortly after Facebook made it&#8217;s big splash on the stock market. That&#8217;s one obvious reason why social media as we know it at Facebook and Twitter isn&#8217;t really compatible with capitalism. But, back to that little free speech problem they both seem to have, there&#8217;s another issue.</p> <p>Theoretically, one would think that it would be a good idea to cater to the needs of actual businesses, as opposed to non-profit special interest groups, at least if one is running on the assumption that a company wants to make money. In this game, it&#8217;s called &#8220;monetizing an internet property&#8221;. For those of you that need the real English translation of the phrase, that means coming up with a way to make something you created online turn a profit, in spite of the fact that it was never designed to make a dime in the first place. In Facebook&#8217;s case, that&#8217;s involved really annoying advertising, and design changes on the pages &#8212; not to mention the really pushy requests to users about promoting their posts, for a price. Twitter has been toying with things like promoted posts and trends, with little success.</p> <p>What they both have in common is a failure to recognize the demographics of their respective clientele, because they both tend to alienate business owners and individuals with disposable income &#8212; you know, conservatives and libertarians. Of course, they don&#8217;t even recognize that they have clientele in the first place, because they refer to them as users &#8212; yet another hint that they&#8217;re not really compatible with that whole concept of capitalism. That&#8217;s not to say there are no liberals with businesses, or disposable income. It is to say that playing politics is no way to do business, because it tends to exclude too many potential sources of sales or income.</p> <p>Non-scientific as it may be, there is a fairly simple way to determine who is doing the most on Twitter at any given moment. Just taking a look at the global trends, without specifying a geographical region, says what topics are on top. It&#8217;s fairly rare when there isn&#8217;t at least one trending topic that is dominated by conservative and libertarian clientele. So, the most active and possibly most numerous are regularly subjected to attack, and aren&#8217;t really protected by Twitter. Obviously, that isn&#8217;t really a great business plan. That&#8217;s like opening a convenience store in a community for seniors, importing a teen street gang, and having the juvenile delinquents act menacingly toward seniors attempting to buy a carton of milk.</p> <p>In the case of Facebook, you can apply about the same analogy &#8212; just make sure your store manager treats the juveniles really well, and joins in the games of intimidation against the seniors that would be your paying customers. Even the not-so-business-savvy computer geeks that created these two networks are smart enough to get how colossally stupid that is, by the way.</p> <p>So, where does that leave libertarians and conservatives? Well, we can take the same tactics that have been successful for the liberals, and whine about our issues. Sure, it might work, but no one with a backbone likes to grovel to the opposition.</p> <p>That leaves one of our favorite choices &#8212; capitalism. One approach is to point out potential ways to monetize the networks to the current management, and instead of groveling, try to negotiate ways to avoid these issues. Maybe Twitter would be open to selling &#8220;verified&#8221; status that would override the current situation that causes account suspensions on demand by liberals. Facebook might be willing to adopt a simple policy that if you&#8217;re buying advertising at a certain level, your account can&#8217;t be arbitrarily shut down. The other? There&#8217;s always something new on the horizon. There have been attempts to emulate at least Facebook by conservative minded people, but they haven&#8217;t caught on as well.</p> <p>It&#8217;s time to start thinking about what could be the next big thing when it comes to social networking &#8212; and start watching for it, because it will come. In the meantime, unfortunately the only option is to keep plugging, and refuse to be silenced by liberal-controlled media of any kind. Also might not hurt to call your friendly investment counselor or mutual fund manager, and insist that your money not go to media entities that you disagree with politically.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/13842-dysfunctional-bedfellows-free-speech-capitalism-and-social-media#commentscapitalismConservativesFacebookfree marketFree Speechfreedomhate speechlibertariansLibertyNew MediaTwitterTwitter GulagThu, 30 May 2013 16:15:16 +0000goldwatergal13842 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgHow Can Limited Government Ideas Win Elections?http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12926-how-can-limited-government-ideas-win-elections
<p>I was intrigued by the question posed by Jim Geraghty at National Review Online yesterday, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/342278/do-we-right-still-trust-people">“Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?”</a> My first instinct was to respond “yes, of course we do,” because after all the idea that we as individuals can take care of ourselves better than the government can is one of the reasons we believe in limited government. The problem is, the American people have not been voting as though they really believe that themselves. So really, this question is two questions:</p><ol><li dir="ltr">Do we trust the American people to take care of themselves?; and </li><li dir="ltr">Do we trust the American people to vote in ways that allow them to take care of themselves?</li></ol><p>The answer to the first is obvious, as I’ve already mentioned. We do believe that the people are better at taking care of themselves than the government is. When left alone by government, individuals will be more empowered to make a living for themselves and pursue happiness as they wish. Society as a whole would be happier and more prosperous under a limited government than it currently is under big government.</p><p>The second question is much more difficult, because the American people have not voted for liberty. Instead, they have voted for the much easier relative security of the cradle-to-grave welfare/entitlement state and the nurturing of big government statism. Clearly the American electorate has not given us reason to have faith in them to vote against the largesse, as the welfare state has continued to grow. The question is: Why? And as a secondary question, how do we reach out to voters to get them to understand that they will be better off under smaller government than they are under big government?</p><p>The answer of why so many people have voted for more big government is that they have been conditioned to believe that they truly are voting in their own self-interest. They really do believe that they are better off by voting to have the rich guy in the nice neighborhood pay more taxes so that they can receive food stamps, welfare, section 8 housing, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, free birth control, ObamaCare, and other big government programs. You and I know that these programs are sapping their incentive and drive to better themselves, but unfortunately many of these voters simply don’t know better.</p><p>These voters have recently been dubbed “low-information voters” by Herman Cain, Rush Limbaugh, and others, but the information that they do get is antithetical to liberty. After all, the image about libertarians, conservatives, and Republicans that many voters get is that we light cigars with $100 bills, only care about cutting taxes for rich people, hate poor people, kick puppies, and hate America. Part of the problem is in our messaging. After all, yes, we do support cutting taxes for rich people; you and I know that lower taxes lead to more prosperity and more opportunity for those who are in poverty by giving them the ability to find jobs and advance their economic cause in life by earning a paycheck that they have the ability to make larger through hard work and gaining job skills. Yes, we do believe in cutting entitlement and handout programs, because these programs discourage work, prevent people from taking the individual initiative to work hard and earn more money, and perpetuate poverty not only for those on the programs but for their children, who get caught in the cycle of dependence. We know how these programs work, but by saying we want to cut them without eloquently saying why it is in the interest of those using the programs to cut them, we lose the ability to ever gain their support. Yes, there is an excellent moral case to be made against robbing Peter to pay Paul, but there are a lot more Pauls than Peters, and the Pauls vote. We have to reach out to Paul as well.</p><p>How do we do that? As AEI President Arthur Brooks <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324338604578326350052940798.html?mod=hp_opinion">wrote in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal</a>, the problem is rooted in the fact that only 33% of Americans believed that Mitt Romney “care[d] about people like me.” We have to stop being so callous in our messaging, and instead of just making our case, we have to make it clear how it helps all Americans. We have to show why the free enterprise system works for ALL Americans, not just the rich. We have to show that we care, and that our policies are the way that we care. We have to make the moral case against the welfare state from the perspective of those currently using the welfare state, and we have to show those individuals why freedom is better for them. As Brooks says:</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr">Meanwhile, the record of free enterprise in improving the lives of the poor both here and abroad is spectacular. According to Columbia University economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the percentage of people in the world living on a dollar a day or less—a traditional poverty measure—has fallen by 80% since 1970. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history. That achievement is not the result of philanthropy or foreign aid. It occurred because billions of souls have been able to pull themselves out of poverty thanks to global free trade, property rights, the rule of law and entrepreneurship.</p><p dir="ltr">The left talks a big game about helping the bottom half, but its policies are gradually ruining the economy, which will have catastrophic results once the safety net is no longer affordable. Labyrinthine regulations, punitive taxation and wage distortions destroy the ability to create private-sector jobs. Opportunities for Americans on the bottom to better their station in life are being erased.</p><p dir="ltr">Some say the solution for conservatives is either to redouble the attacks on big government per se, or give up and try to build a better welfare state. Neither path is correct. Raging against government debt and tax rates that most Americans don&#8217;t pay gets conservatives nowhere, and it will always be an exercise in futility to compete with liberals on government spending and transfers.</p><p dir="ltr">Instead, the answer is to make improving the lives of vulnerable people the primary focus of authentically conservative policies. For example, the core problem with out-of-control entitlements is not that they are costly—it is that the impending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens. Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats—too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns—but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.</p></blockquote><p>This is the case that conservatives/libertarians/Republicans need to be making. We have to show more people why and how our ideas and policies work for them. Then we may be able to get them to trust themselves the way that we trust all individuals to care for themselves. Winning at the ballot box will be the only way to push for more freedom (and, despite their recent big-government ways and the weakness of their Congressional leadership, I do agree with Rep. Justin Amash that we should be <a href="/articles/12888-justin-amash-young-libertarians-should-work-inside-the-gop">working through the GOP</a> to push our agenda).</p><p>One other problem that needs to be addressed is the idea that many conservatives simply don’t trust people to make personal social decisions for themselves. The idea of the American people being capable of managing their own financial affairs but not their social ones goes against the original question of whether or not we trust the American people. If we do trust the American people to take care of themselves, then we can also trust them to make the decision to marry someone of the same sex, to make wise decisions on whether or not to use certain drugs, or for a woman to choose whether or not to have an abortion. The social busybodies are costing votes for our side, and right now the image for conservatives is not good. Look at CPAC <a href="http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/02/27/cpac-deflates-the-big-tent-over-goproud/?singlepage=true">banning GOProud</a> from sponsoring events this year and gay marriage opponents trying to oust the Chairman of the Illinois Republican Party over his <a href="http://lizmair.com/blog.php?Index=722">support of gay marriage</a>. There are also millions of women who may otherwise be open to the idea of economic liberty, but who hate the idea of the government telling them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies. There are millions of young people who may be open to our ideas, but refuse to vote for conservatives because of their support of the failed Drug War.</p><p>Ultimately, what conservatism needs is to become more libertarian, and we all need to reach out to the American people by first, defining the problems of big government; second, showing everybody why big government is bad for them as individuals; and third, by showing how liberty will benefit them. That’s the only way to save America from the impending fiscal doom. We have to win at the ballot box.</p><p><em>Jeff Scott is a former and aspiring future radio host currently hosting his own weekly podcast, which you can listen to at <a href="http://www.jeffscottshow.com/">www.jeffscottshow.com</a>. You can find him <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jeffscottshow">@jeffscottshow</a> on Twitter and on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/jeffscottshow">Facebook</a>.</em></p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12926-how-can-limited-government-ideas-win-elections#commentsArthur BrooksJim GeraghtylibertarianismlibertariansLibertylimited governmentRepublican PartyRepublicansThu, 07 Mar 2013 17:17:04 +0000Jeff Scott12926 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgGlenn Beck's new "libertarian" network is a good thinghttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12376-glenn-becks-new-libertarian-network-is-a-good-thing
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="/files/images/beck.jpg" alt="Glenn Beck" width="520" /></p><p>When I first heard that Glenn Beck was <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/glenn-beck-relaunching-the-blaze-as-global-liberta">going to relaunch his &#8220;The Blaze&#8221; as a libertarian-focused network</a>, I was skeptical as I&#8217;m sure a lot of libertarians were. While Beck has called himself a libertarian for some time, he has spent the last few years peddling in conspiracy theories and general looniness that has served to be quite an embarassment. I used to listen to his radio show and watched his Fox News program for about a year before I became tired of his antics. So when his show was canceled and he moved to a pay-per-view format, I was glad to see him go.</p> <p>But Beck has proven he knows what he is doing. He has been able to create a successful business outside the cable world. He is reaching a sizable audience, largely of the young folks that need to be won to the libertarian cause. These folks might already be leaning that way and would benefit greatly from hearing more libertarian viewpoints and analysis. And there are many more who simply never hear this perspective who might be getting it for the first time, or the first time by actual libertarians instead of cartoonish versions given by the regular media.</p> <p>By no means should we be naive here - Beck could be doing this for purely cynical reasons and he has not shown the best judgment in who he chooses to give a platform. He is by no means a &#8220;perfect&#8221; spokesman - he has loads of baggage and a tendency to say some bothersome things. But on the other hand, libertarians simply do not have much media penetration at all now. We get the occasional visit by Judge Napolitano on Fox News (who subscribes to some truther conspiracies) and the excellent show hosted by John Stossel. Beyond that, though, what we get is the mainstream media either ignoring us or portraying us as nutjobs. The average American cannot define what a libertarian is or how our viewpoint differs from left and right.</p> <p>So if the new Beck network gets these views out there, I&#8217;m all for it. If it brings more into the fold of thinking beyond red and blue, who am I to argue? Surely it could backfire and end up causing more of a headache than a benefit, but for once I&#8217;m choosing to be cautiously optimistic. The libertarian worldview simply must reach a wider audience, and it may just take an imperfect messenger to do so.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12376-glenn-becks-new-libertarian-network-is-a-good-thing#commentsGBTVGlenn BecklibertarianlibertarianismlibertariansThe BlazeWed, 09 Jan 2013 16:30:00 +0000blehman12376 at http://www.unitedliberty.orgLand-use policy needs to rely on marketshttp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12163-land-use-policy-needs-to-rely-on-markets
<p><em>Michael Hamilton is a libertarian writer living in Washington, D.C. His main interests are economics, drug legalization, immigration, and land-use policy.</em></p><p><em>&#8220;The plans differ; the planners are all alike.&#8221; </em>&#8212; Frédéric Bastiat</p><p>It’s common to hear libertarians pejoratively referred to as “Republicans who smoke pot,” the idea being that libertarians don’t really favor freedom in areas where it would lead to outcomes they do not like. For the most part this is false. There is one policy area, however, where this is an accurate criticism: land-use policy. On this issue, the dominant libertarian narrative does not live up to its name.</p><p>The narrative, to put it briefly, is that most Americans prefer detached, single-family homes, and zoning laws reflect this for the most part. Save for eliminating certain regulations aimed at curbing sprawl that make homes expensive such as open space rules or growth boundaries, it says policymakers should avoid making major changes to traditional zoning laws lest we fall into the hands of the &#8220;planners&#8221; and have to live under &#8220;smart growth&#8221; policies. The narrative associates suburbs, homeownership, and cars with mobility and better living. Libertarians main goals, so it goes, should be relatively inexpensive (or at least not “artificially expensive”) single-family homes and decent traffic. Note that libertarians who support traditional zoning do not consider themselves planners</p><p>This narrative is not only wrong, but distinctly unlibertarian. Before I attack it, two small concessions:</p><p>First, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_growth">smart growth</a> is something that libertarians should oppose for both philosophical and utilitarian reasons.</p><p>Second, <a href="http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/units.html">a lot</a> of Americans do choose to live in single-family, detached homes. For the past seventy years, most residential buildings have been single-family, detached homes, and this is unlikely to change in the future. While I think the location and number of single-family homes was altered by government interventions, I don’t think that everyone will live in dense neighborhoods absent these interventions.</p><p>However, demonstrating that smart growth is not a libertarian urban development strategy, or that suburbs are vibrant, is insufficient to demonstrate that traditional zoning is a free-market or libertarian policy. In addition, this narrative conflicts with the most common conceptual frameworks libertarians use for understanding policy&#8212;public choice theory, spontaneous order, and rule of law.</p><p>The first problem with the ‘libertarian’ work on land use is the way it is framed. <a href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/003224-a-housing-preference-sea-change-not-california">According to them</a>, there is a struggle between people who support traditional zoning and single-family homes, and smart growth advocates imposing urbanism on others.</p><p>A libertarian shouldn&#8217;t care one way or another about how people choose to live so long as they do not victimize others. Whether American cities take the form of Gotham or Mayberry, libertarians should instead care about the process through which this is accomplished. One of the most basic tenets of libertarianism is that market processes&#8212;which involve voluntary interactions between millions of individuals&#8212;should direct economic action.</p><p>Writers like Wendell Cox, who has written for libertarian organizations <a href="http://reason.org/authors/show/wendell-cox">Reason Foundation</a> and <a href="http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-smart-growth-scam/">Foundation for Economic Education</a>, constantly critique smart growth for <a href="http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7997&amp;page=1">causing home prices to rise</a> and say these are the “predictable” outcomes of government intervention. Somehow, it escapes their attention that traditional zoning is likewise a government intervention with <a href="http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=1489">predictable, similar, outcomes</a>.</p><p>For libertarians, the basic unit of social analysis is the individual. Zoning, with its attendant restraints on voluntary action and market processes, pits the individual against the state. This is true whether or not the state actors who control zoning prefer suburbs (traditional zoning) or dense cities (smart growth). Both approaches determine lot sizes, parking policies, height limits, and setback requirements through the political process. Both require developers who wish for an exception to the rules to go through a costly entitlement process</p><p>The preferred policies of most ‘libertarian’ land use writers suffer from what F.A. Hayek called the knowledge problem. Support for traditional zoning because it delivers the <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_3_snd-los-angeles.html">type of city that one prefers</a> might sound plausible to conservatives, but it should sound like an out-of-tune piano to a libertarian ear. As Hayek <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html">wrote</a>,</p><p> </p><p dir="ltr">“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate &#8220;given&#8221; resources—if &#8220;given&#8221; is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these &#8220;data.&#8221; It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”</p><p dir="ltr">Cities&#8212;like economies, languages, and law&#8212;function best when they result from Hayek called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order">spontaneous order</a>. Rather than affirm the kind of development people want, land-use regulation has instead supplanted the only mechanism that could possibly tell homebuilders what people want: the price system. Zoning has distorted the price signals that owners of capital would employ to determine how to put their land and existing buildings to use because zoning has designated almost all desirable land as off-limits to any kind of development other than what it is currently used for. At the same time, people choosing where to live face different prices and types of housing than would have been offered by the free market. The result is an inefficient, man-made mess.</p><p>Central planning, i.e. zoning, causes resources&#8212;land, building materials, money, and time&#8212;to be spent inefficiently. Not only would a market have allocated all of these resources more efficiently than city planners could have (i.e in a spontaneous order), but our cities would have taken a largely different shape over the last <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid,_Ohio_v._Ambler_Realty_Co.">86 years</a>. It is impossible to estimate the scope and magnitude of the losses incurred throughout the economy, but these are the unseen costs that libertarians routinely warn of in other policy areas. So too should it be with land use policy.</p><p>A Hayekian approach should also make a libertarian wonder how traditional zoning advocates were able to determine what people want, and whether traditional zoning has delivered it. As economic information is dispersed across millions of people all over the country, and their preferences for housing to purchase or build is weighed against every other option and also against every other good they desire, I suspect that no single person could ever determine such a thing. That preferences and populations are constantly changing makes such a determination even less likely.</p><p>Land use regulation, as carried out in most cities, is also incompatible with the libertarian concept of rule of law. As Hayek outlined in his greatest work, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Law-Legislation-Liberty-Rules-Order/dp/0226320863">Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume One</a>, a free society should be “restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application” and is most likely to achieve the ends valued by individuals under such an arrangement. Or, as David Boaz <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/key-concepts-libertarianism">put it</a>, the law should “not aim at any particular result or outcome.”</p><p>Zoning codes, and the permitting process that accompanies construction, are the antithesis of this concept of law: anyone who wishes to build or remodel a building has to go through a process that will, at some stage, require a bureaucrat or commission to approve or deny a plan based on his subjective judgement or tastes, with the goal being to ensure a particular outcome or type of city.</p><p>Land use regulation can seem, at first glance, to be primarily based on general rules. This is the case in places like cities like Washington or Houston (often <a href="http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/general_dev_regulations.pdf">falsely</a> cited as having ”<a href="http://www.houston.org/economic-development/joel-kotkin/pdf/KotkinReportwithlinks.pdf">minimal land use restrictions</a>”). However, these cities usually create such restrictive rules that many desirable, standard land uses fall <a href="http://swamplot.com/rejected-again-the-ashby-highrises-latest-failing-grade/2009-07-22/">outside the “as of right”</a> development allowed by law, and force developers to seek a variance. Depending on how far outside of the code individuals wish to build, they are subject to different levels of discretion by local bureaucrats. In some cases, when developers wish to build far outside of what is allowed, they have to go through the <a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2011/10/28/starting-over-at-tenleytown-safeway/">nightmarish</a> “<a href="http://www.dcregs.dc.gov/Gateway/ChapterHome.aspx?ChapterNumber=11-24">planned unit development</a>” process, as they call it here in D.C. As libertarians have pointed out in regard to <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj8n1/cj8n1-9.pdf">criminal justice</a>, discretion invariably leads to corruption. Even if it were the case that city planners usually approve buildings that exceed zoning codes, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory">public choice theory</a> suggests it would be foolish going forward to rely on the benevolence of the state instead of creating rule-based laws that respect individual’s rights to develop their property.</p><p>One reason zoning laws are so popular is that they give people within a political jurisdiction what amounts to a veto over any project that they do not like, or that they feel will change the character of their neighborhood. In the absence of this arrangement, these same people would either have to purchase the land in question or compensate developers to prevent them from building projects that don’t suit current residents’ tastes. Instead, zoning allows them to stop development for free, in what amounts to stealing through <a href="http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2007/Epsteinzoning.mp3">regulatory takings</a>.</p><p>It is important to note here that the types of land use regulation preferred in the dominant libertarian narrative do not primarily address legitimate problems such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance">nuisance</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort#Intentional_torts">other harms</a> that libertarians rightfully seek to address in law. Nor does it deal primarily with ensuring that developers do not overwhelm public utilities or pass negative externalities onto third parties.</p><p>When viewed through these conceptual frameworks, the policy supported by the dominant libertarian narrative isn’t all that different from the authoritarian smart growth policy that it opposes. These ‘libertarians’ shouldn’t be surprised that the state apparatus they want to control land use is operated by people with differing goals at least half the time. An actual libertarian policy alternative would move towards a development process that is rule-based and focused on the rights of individuals, not particular outcomes such as single-family homes, density, sustainability, or walkability&#8212;whatever the merits of each.</p><p>Contrary to what is often written on land use policy, I see no reason why people who enjoy suburbs should necessarily oppose those who support density and urban living. Under free-market conditions there is room for both to live as they please. The only caveat is that the market will determine where skyscrapers and single-family homes are built, and that people would have to pay the full costs associated with living in either arrangement.</p><p>We need only to agree to let others live as they choose. Shouldn’t this be the default position for libertarians anyway?</p><p>__________________________________________</p><p>Post-script: I am obviously not the first libertarian to write about this issue, and I have barely touched the economics behind it. For ongoing, in-depth coverage, I suggest following Emily Washington and Stephen Smith at <a href="http://www.marketurbanism.com/">www.marketurbanism.com</a>. For academic work, I suggest papers by <a href="http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/edward-glaeser">Ed Glaeser</a>, and GMU’s Alex Tabarrok has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Voluntary-City-Choice-Community-Society/dp/1598130323">a book</a> on this issue. Matt Yglesias, full-time non-libertarian, is libertarian on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355249077&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=rent+is+too+damn+high">housing policy</a>.</p>http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12163-land-use-policy-needs-to-rely-on-markets#commentseconomic libertyFrédéric Bastiatfree marketland-useland-use policylibertarianismlibertariansprivate property rightsproperty rightThu, 13 Dec 2012 17:14:47 +0000Guest12163 at http://www.unitedliberty.org